Icon: Siouxsie Sioux

She is the queen, a goddess among mortals, an inspiration to us all, forever.

She took to dyeing her hair, inspired by the glam, but more extreme. Crazy colour. Black. Blonde. Eyes painted like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. She liked Nico and Patti Smith and Catwoman. All her heroes were heroines. And so, somewhere between doing the Strand and hearing Patti Smith’s Horses album for the first time, Susan became Siouxsie.

“I wanted to be important,” she remembers. “To mean something.” She went on the bus in a see-through shirt, demanded a half fare and got one. She walked into Pips wine bar in Bromley leading her friend Berlin on a dog collar. (“We were,” he recalled later, “up camp tree.”) At one party, in Bromley, where sulphate was snorted off a turntable, she is remembered as sporting a plastic apron, a leather whip, and very little else.

Her mother was slightly worried. “Take a pully,” she would say as her daughter, mind on the Velvets, style deranged by Cabaret, left the house in fishnets and stilletos and crystal clear plastic. “Take a pully. It might get cold.” Later, her mother was proud of Siouxsie’s success and, to Siouxsie’s irritation, would invite the fans into the house for tea.

She thought she might be a model but she was too weird. She thought she might be a secretary but she ended up working in clubs. And everything about her said don’t fuck with me because she looked tough and she took it further than everyone else. Siouxsie had a score to settle.